‘Fabulous’… a still from What Happened, Miss Simone?
Photograph: Sundance

There’s an insurance clause with some documentaries. If your subject is sufficiently electrifying and the bulk of the picture consists of archival footage, you pretty much can’t lose. Liz Garbus, the Bobby Fischer Against the World documentarian whose style can politely be called unobtrusive, hit the motherlode with Nina Simone.

Simone, whose music you either know or should at least pretend to know for fear of being mocked as an uncultured rube, was born in segregated North Carolina and, by a stroke of luck, received classical piano training from the age of four. She aspired to a career playing “serious music”, but discrimination kept her from pursuing that dream. She began to sing in bars and nightclubs (and changed her name from Eunice Waymon), and once she did, it was a fairly quick road to success. Her deep baritone was soulful and bluesy, but her cadences mixed jazz with her classically inspired piano playing. Her interpretations of standards (like Gershwin’s I Loves You Porgy, below) were truly groundbreaking.

Garbus’s film weaves together the stories of Simone’s public successes and private struggles. Her husband, a former cop who became her manager, worked her hard so she could have the finer things, but in time, their relationship became abusive. He shrugged at her “wasting time” with civil rights activism when she could have been earning on the road – Simone performed her controversial Mississippi Goddamn, written in response to the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, during the Selma-Montgomery march in the presence of Dr King.

As the conflagration of the late 1960s grew more intense, Simone became more radicalised, at one point asking a black audience if they were ready to kill for black liberation. This, as I’m sure you can imagine, restricted her career’s growth. She also became addicted to pills, had bipolar episodes, and was a general mess. Talking-head interviews with her daughter give specific insight.

But there was always the music, and this movie has plenty of it. And let’s not forget that film is a visual medium. As such, What Happened, Miss Simone? is a wall-to-wall fantasia of fabulous outfits, from African print frocks to outsized hats that would look absurd on anyone other than a centre of gravity like Nina Simone.

Clearly there is entertainment value in this documentary, but it’s very much of a “behind the music” calibre. A clip, commentary from an associate or a critic like Stanley Crouch, another clip, rinse, repeat. A post-festival distribution deal is already in place with Netflix and, frankly, that’s the perfect format for Garbus’s by-the-numbers storytelling. What Happened, Miss Simone? is another example of Wikipedia-entry-as-cinema, but with a life this remarkable, it’s still worth a look.